2d elemental depiction flawed

[Brandedblade]

That's just more lore-wrapping imho. You can make up whatever lore you want to match what you want it to be sense-be-damned.
-snip-
..but that’s just me, and I’m not an expert storyteller..so I trust the devs to do what they can, even if I don’t really like it.

As I stated earlier. Black Magic adds chaos and activity, thus destruction to their spells. White Magic is its opposite, bringing order and inactivity to its spells. Taken to extremes you have Spells like Foul which are essentially pure blasts of chaotic aether and spells like Holy which shock bodies into 'stasis'.

Magic in FFXIV is ultimately down to two things, it's elemental Aspect, and it's Astral/Umbral polarity. The origins of the word Astral/Umbral are mostly irrelevant at this point when they essentially mean "Active or Passive". Would it be better if the game just called it that from the start? Of course it would. But unfortunately they screwed this up back in 1.0 and now they're trying to make it work.

The elements prefer one charge or another but can ultimately exist within that spectrum. Hence what you said about how water can soothe and cleanse but also destroy. That too me would indicate that the element is charged in one way or another, water that heals and soothes can be argued to be more umbrally aligned since it's bringing order to something, whereas a destructive tidal wave can be argued to be more astrally aligned since it's full of force and activity.

The reason why black mages don't call forth destructive tidal waves and White mages can't heal with warm flames, from my perspective, is purely a game flavor thing. I don't see any reason with these rules set in place for that to be an impossibility. They did what they did to make White and Black mages completely distinct from one another in aesthetic and gameplay.

[Iscah]

That's just more lore-wrapping imho. You can make up whatever lore you want to match what you want it to be sense-be-damned.

Isn't that the whole point of the exercise though?

There is an acceptable lore justification for the current system, even if you could make alternate ones if you were building a similar elemental system from scratch.

As long as the explanation for the system as it stands makes sense, that should be all that matters.

[kaynide]

I guess I would just say the tl;dr of my thoughts on it, is that it feels like a bandaid solution to shoehorn it into the system they wanted for 2.0 (basically weird classes that could mix and match suddenly becoming very rigid classic FF jobs).

Again, don’t blame anyone as the devs were racing just to even make 2.0 possible, so getting super tight lore on how magic works is a level of minutia that ultimately doesn’t matter.

Not that I’m mad or even overly against what they did- I’m just being fussy .

[Brandedblade]

I guess I would just say the tl;dr of my thoughts on it, is that it feels like a bandaid solution to shoehorn it into the system they wanted for 2.0 (basically weird classes that could mix and match suddenly becoming very rigid classic FF jobs).

Again, don’t blame anyone as the devs were racing just to even make 2.0 possible, so getting super tight lore on how magic works is a level of minutia that ultimately doesn’t matter.

Not that I’m mad or even overly against what they did- I’m just being fussy .

Understandable. I personally like the way it makes me think and speculate, hence why i was so eager to provide speculation and my interpretation of the matter.